In 2010, following the murder of a staff reporter from the Diario in Ciudad Juarez, the editor of that newspaper published an open letter to the drug cartels who have overrun this border city. “What do you want from us?” the headline read. Editor Gerardo Rodriguez went on to acknowledge the general feelings of the people of Juarez: that the cartels had become the “de facto authorities” in Juarez, since “the legal institutions have not been able to keep our colleagues from dying.”

This past week, in the wake of the shooting of another Diario photographer, NPR’s Brooke Gladstone spoke with Gerardo Rodriguez about his unprecedented letter and about the difficult situation of reporters in Mexico today. “We are in the middle, under fire,” says Gerardo. Yet the fact that this story is being told, in the U.S. andaround the globe, is testament to the work that Mexico’s courageous journalists continue to do. “Even though right now I’m hopeless,” says Gerardo, “I think that things are changing.”